Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Transcription Mystery Disc #30

This is a Zephyr home recording acetate. It's the typical 6.5 inches in diameter and spins at 78 rpm. This one has a fiber core and is a tad thicker than an average disc. Zephyr also made 8-inch acetates with red labels and green labels but I'm aware of no other variants. This one is dates 3/16/44, making it almost exactly 68 years old. The label states that it's also "approved by underwriter's laboratories." I have no idea what that entails. It starts at the outer edge.

The recording is of a woman singing, I applied two different noise filters and a low pass filter to great improvement. There were no significant pops to edit out, despite that I don't recognize the tune and the handwriting is illegible. Readers best guesses are welcome on either front.

These were made by Zephyr Products... but there have been many companies with that name. I think it was the one located at 160 E. 116th St. in New York City, then later at 129 E. 124th street also in New York. They appear in the Broadcasting Yearbook from 1942 to 1954 as selling "recording discs, wire recordings spools, needles, accessories." In 1951 and 1952 The manager was listed as Irving London. The rest is a mystery.

Please Refrain From Wiki-theiving

All content herein should be considered to have a Creative-commons-like license with the sole exclusion of Wikipedia. I welcome use of my research by all writers, readers and researchers except those that would publish such information on Wikipedia. Thank you.